Instituted by the Catholic Church in 1231, the Inquisition conducted its last execution in 1826; the victim was a Spanish schoolmaster convicted of heresy. But as Cullen Murphy shows in this provocative and unexpectedly witty analysis, not only did the offices of the Inquisition survive into the 20th century, its supposedly medieval methods were in fact innovative and surprisingly modern. The Inquisition was the first bureaucratic institution dedicated to surveillance, intelligence gathering, keeping personal files, censorship, and "scientific" interrogation. From freshly opened Vatican archives to the filing cabinets of the Third Reich—and the detention camps of Guantánamo—Murphy traces the Inquisition and its legacy.

"God's Jury is a reminder, and we need to be constantly reminded, that the most dangerous people in the world are the righteous, and when they wield real power, look out. At once global and chillingly intimate in its reach, the Inquisition turns out to have been both more and less awful than we thought."—Mark Bowden